Response to Deborah Bright

In this essay Deborah Bright negotiates between the historically banal depictions of landscape and their underlying political and social charge. In the western art historical trajectory landscape paintings and photography have generally targeted the middle class and promoted a timeless, utopic view of life. No matter what era, one can always reflect on landscape imagery and be reassured that a pristine nature still exists somewhere, even if the viewer can’t see it for himself or herself. Bright asserts that landscape imagery serves a greater purpose than just being an artistic placeholder for the nonpolitical, in fact, the landscape painting or photograph is filled with cultural information that abandons its often trite intentions. Bright provides the example of a Norman Rockwell landscape of “small town America” (p.334), what one might think of as being an innocent idyllic image of American life provides the viewer with a very narrow image of reality. The small town is geared directly toward the well off, white, and protestant demographic, it is dotted with small churches, promotes small business culture by glorifying main street America. In what one might think of as a universally accessible image, this landscape becomes exclusionary of a range of social, economic, and racial demographics. What fascinated me about Bright’s take on a piece by Norman Rockwell was that as a kid I always bought into this presentation of the “real America”. Growing up just a few hours outside of Stockbridge Massachusetts, the home of the Norman Rockwell Museum and his studio, I would take daytrips with my mother to view his work. Especially as a child, it was so easy to view his work based on its surface presentation but looking back it served no purpose but to shelter me and other viewers from the cultural realities in front of us.